"Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
...the fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being govern'd, as the sea is, by the moon" [Henry IV, I.ii.31-33]
HISTORY NEVER REPEATS ITSELF, BUT IT OFTEN RHYMES
"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." Otto von Bismarck

The Ex-Im Bank has withdrawn its loan guarantees on a huge project in India because its fat-ass quango bureaucrat Fred Hochberg, the typical know-nothing, cover-his-enormous-ass Chairboy of the bank, fears his pitiful job might be in jeopardy if he approves the guarantees covering $600 million in Bucyrus International Equipment sale. Socialist bitch Hillary ClintOOn and Tax-dodging Timmy Geithner concurred with Chairboy Fat-Ass's ruling:

The fossil fuel project was the first to come before the government-run bank since it adopted a climate-change policy to settle a lawsuit and to meet Obama administration directives.

"President Obama has made clear his administration's commitment to transition away from high-carbon investments and toward a cleaner-energy future," Export-Import Bank Chairman Fred Hochberg said in a statement. "After careful deliberation, the Export-Import Bank board voted not to proceed with this project because of the projected adverse environmental impact."

The bank's decision is puzzling, Sullivan said, because the power plant will meet international standards and the bank's environmental criteria.

The plant is under construction in Sasan, central India, and is scheduled to be up and running in 2012. Coal mining will take place for the plant whether it's done with Bucyrus machines or equipment from China and Belarus, Sullivan said.

"Unless the Obama administration jumps all over this and corrects a wrong fairly quickly, I am confident this business is going elsewhere," Sullivan told the Journal Sentinel on Saturday.

"The bank's decision has had no impact on global carbon emissions but has cost the U.S. nearly 1,000 jobs," he added.

The Export-Import Bank would not elaborate on the board's 2-1 vote - including Hochberg's - to deny the loan guarantees.

The U.S. State and Treasury departments recommended against making the loan guarantees. Neither agency could be reached for comment Saturday.

D-bag Hochberg didn't care about US jobs as long as he can warm the Chairboy seat at Ex-Im with his considerable haunches spreading to the floor on both sides of the chair he waddles up to daily to make his determinations, always guided by the dunce in the Oval Office. This is done despite the nasty and lucid complaints of politicians in Wisconsin and elsewhere:

Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Sen. Herb Kohl, Republican Rep. Paul Ryan and Mayor Tom Barrett, the Democratic candidate for governor, voiced their objections to the Export-Import Bank decision, which may be irreversible since there isn't an appeals process.

Doyle said he met with Hochberg to stress the importance of the mining equipment sale, which was contingent on the loan guarantees, for sustaining jobs here.

"I was absolutely stunned by their decision. It was the most shortsighted, unconscionable decision you could imagine, and I can't see any justification for it," the governor said.

Doyle said he hopes the bank's decision can be reversed before India turns to China or Belarus for mining equipment.

The decision could set a precedent that would keep other nations from buying U.S. mining equipment, especially since China offers discount financing on machines built there, which puts the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage.

"My discussions with the bank chairman were hardly confidence-building," Doyle said. "They really could not justify their decision except somehow, somebody told them that if the word coal is anywhere in a plan, then they can't move forward with it."

Obama is scheduled to be in Racine on Wednesday.

Doyle said he wants to meet with the president and urge him to ask the Export-Import Bank to reconsider its decision.

"I am a green-energy guy," Doyle said. "But I also understand that we need coal as a major source of energy. What that means is, we need to develop and support the technologies and businesses that are involved in the production of energy from clean coal. Bucyrus is one of those businesses."

So Doyle is going to corner the Dunce-in-Chief in Racine----lotsa luck, Guv, as most observers note recently that this pickininny prince just ain't focussed on much and remains unbriefed on issues that come before him---or so Gen. McChrystal, a lifelong Demo-rat who banned FoxNEWS from his Afghan HQ, noted recently. Check out my blog yesterday for more info on the cafe-au-lait d-bag's insouciance on these matters. Or better yet, I'll insert a couple of Mark Steyn's observations:

Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their "super-skimmers": Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers," reported the senator.He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care. "It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all," wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. "For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much."This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, maybe a month before the Iowa caucuses in 2008!

Here's the Bucyrus CEO's statements on the matter.

Sullivan plans to seek community support, including help from Bucyrus suppliers and the United Steelworkers of America, which represents Bucyrus employees, to urge the Export-Import Bank to change its decision. Otherwise, Sullivan said, there is no appeals process for votes by the Export-Import Bank board.

Bucyrus has 250 suppliers in Wisconsin that employ 15,000 people, according to the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce.

"These companies are dependent on Bucyrus' ability to capture international sales and export their machines," said Tim Sheehy, MMAC president. "If Bucyrus catches a cold on this, there are hundreds of employers that get sick."

National Mining Association spokeswoman Carol Raulston called the Export-Import Bank's decision shortsighted and said it sets a dangerous precedent for other developing nations wanting to do business with Bucyrus.

"India has millions of people living in poverty, and coal is going to be their most affordable source of electricity," Raulston said.

The Bucyrus equipment that was ordered for India included two draglines, which are machines weighing millions of pounds and tall enough to loom over a 20-story building.

It takes three years to build a dragline at a cost of more than $100 million.

The initial equipment order also included eight electric-powered rope shovels and 180 mining trucks. With additional options, services and other products, the order could exceed $600 million, according to Bucyrus.

"This is a huge deal for us," Sullivan said. Without the order, he added, the company must find other work to avoid layoffs.

"We are going to fight hard to keep this order, but frankly, India can probably find better partners than the U.S. to develop its energy sector," Sullivan said.

If you want to gag, read the communist comments of Sierra Club and Greenpeace subversives in the article. Also read the many letters to the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel which reflect the outrage of citizens being deprived of their wherewithal by roving bands of anarchists similar to the criminals trying to disrupt the G-20 meeting in Toronto.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

As for our genetic propinquity with James Clarence, the only long-ago oral legends of our family are that we Mangans hailed from either C. Clare or C. Cork, both adjacent to C. Limerick where J. C. Mangan was allegedly born ["allegedly" because the link to Shanagolden in County Limerick makes nary a mention of his association with the tiny burgh, pop. 428].

Mark Steyn is the most intelligent articulate commentator on American mores and manners, political and social and even entertainment, as his polymath range of cerebral cortex connections approaches the UNIVERSAL JUNCTION POINT!!

Excuse my absence from felicity stateside as I pursued joy on the other side of the Pond in Ireland, Scotland, and the England of yore for the last fortnight, as they would say over there. Keep the peat fires burning in the auld country, and keep the malt a-drying o'er the coals of sod gone bye.

Mark sums up the amazing volte-face that Obama and his BP dancing partners have done ever since the elderly catamite Lord Browne bought my employer Amoco and BP became my pension-dispensing source of income. Here is how Mark outlines the new nonsense that is being ladled out from the moron in the Oval Office:

What do Gen. McChrystal and British Petroleum have in common? Aside from the fact that they're both Democratic Party supporters.Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They'll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their "Beyond Petroleum" marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats' favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam.

But what do McChrystal's and BP's defenestration tell us about the president of the United States? Barack Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain's Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stone piece was "a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year." If finding Obama "not engaged" is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America's overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their "super-skimmers": Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. "He doesn't seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers," reported the senator.He doesn't seem to know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't know, and he doesn't seem to care that he doesn't care. "It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama's foreign policy is no heart at all," wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. "For instance, it's not clear that Obama is appalled by China's appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much."This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?"Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

Anyone who knows Richard Cohen over the decades understands that he is a hopelessly revolving wind-sock which will blurt out anything and its opposite within a brief amount of time without noticing that he's contradicting himself. I met him way back in the eighties and we did a lunch or two at the Tabard Inn as I nodded to his rodomontades against Ronald Reagan, the bete noire of the moment in the Democrat zoo-ologicial landscape. However, Earth-is-Flat Friedman commits the truth when he opines:

"The ugly truth," wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, "is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it."Well, that's certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you'll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats' war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons' Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems' usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you're opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, "no one knew how to get out of it." The "pragmatist" settled for "nuance": He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It's not "victory," it's not "defeat," but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, "quagmire" would seem to cover it.Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, on the one hand, and Britain and the other American allies heading for the check-out, on the other, all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi "quagmire," was there ever any talk of hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?

Thank goodness Mark has a bead on the politician trying to leverage this conflict by triangulation and Dick-Breath Holbrooke's constant e-mail barrages to Central Command HQ and beyond..... Mark does a nice vivisection of the ridiculous nut-job now "running" the show.

To return to Cohen's question: "Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?" Well, he's a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. "Who is this guy?" Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. "What are his core beliefs?" It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It's the "nothing else" that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing......on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be "I don't want to hear about it." Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama's war would be run by Bush's defense secretary and Bush's general?Hey, never mind: the Moveon.org folks have quietly removed their celebrated "General Betray-us" ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the "anti-war" movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don't care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c'est la même chose.Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be.It's hard to fight a war without war aims, and, in the end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier – and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.

Yes, I'm sure the Russkies got hold of Obambi's "disappeared" senior thesis on US-USSR nuke disarmament the callow shallow youth wrote back in the eighties. Now that the dunce has moved to the head of the class, we have to thank our hard-working media for not uncovering these anomalies, including his "disappeared" state senate campaign contribution records for TWO races, so that the American people can remain ignorant of the "plus ça change you can believe in, plus c'est la même chose.

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Baghdad Bob Gibbs is surpassing the oaf McClellan for being the most clueless simpleton ever to be a WH press advisor. Andrew Malcolm of the LA Times has Gibbs' ridiculous insanity right off YouTube.

Gibbs, who only resembled the superhero in fending off the assailants (he wasn't wearing a unitard or anything), managed to successfully not answer a question although it was asked of him 13 times in a row.An awe-inspiring performance? Absolutely. But what else would you expect from the man who called the Obama White House the most transparent in the history of the nation.

Not that it was an important question. Just if the White House tried to bribe U.S. Rep Joe Sestak to drop out of Pennsylvania's Senate primary by promising him a big honking job.

And it's not like this is a crazy rumor started by some tinfoil-wearing nut bag. Sestak himself said it. Numerous times. As recently as Wednesday on CNN.

So was he offered a bribe or not? ABC's Jake Tapper took the first shot at Gibbs.

"Jake, I don’t have anything to add to what I said in March," Gibbs replied.

Back then Gibbs didn't answer the question either except by saying "whatever conversations have been had are not problematic."

Tapper politely noted that he didn't say anything in March. "Then I don’t have anything to add today," Gibbs replied.

Fair enough. So how about if you don't have anything to add, just starting from the beginning then? "Jake, I don’t have anything to add to that," he said.CNN's Ed Henry showed no fear and attempted to assist his unsuccessful colleague.

"Can I ask a quick follow on that, because yesterday Congressman Sestak was on CNN and said, in fact, that he was offered something. He wouldn’t say more, but he said he was offered a job. Would you deny that?"

"I don’t have anything to add to what Jake asked me," Gibbs said.

OK. Then how about just answering what Ed asked you? "I don’t have anything to add to what I said in March," Gibbs said.

How about Gibbs try to get more information? "I don’t have anything to add to what I said in March," he said yet again. And then again.

Obama celebrated the Anniversary of D-Day by an evening at the theater. No mention of the heroism depicted in Saving Private Ryan, which scumbitch Hillary ClyntOOn maneuvered to not get the Oscar for Best Film and to give it to the Weinberg cotton candy fluffball Shakespeare in Love.

Monday, June 07, 2010

Harry's Place has a little backing and forthing on the "flotilla" which includes a bit why Ireland hates Israel so much. Here's my letter to the editor.

I'm off to Ireland next week and will be staying in Cork, where my ancestors departed for the States in the 19th c. I was an FSO and learned Arabic to a high level of speaking and reading, and after twenty years, half of them living in the Arab Middle East, I finally after Arafat's weasel-out of the Barak/Clinton initiative and the immediate Second Intifada, closely followed by 9/11, had a Road to Damascus moment. Now I am one of Israel's most fervent supporters, and have more ammunition than most to support my beliefs and principles.

Sadly, the UN Development Agency has pursued two monumental studies, one in 1990, and the other in 2006 which explained in exhaustive detail just why the economies of Arab countries in particular, and Islamic countries in general, were stagnating or even decreasing compared to population growth. The second was done mainly by Arab and Muslim social and economic scientists, if one can wrap one's mind around "social science." The first had been derided as marred by "orientalist biases." Strangely, the second study by the professionals from the region were much more harsh on themselves and their countries than the 1990 study. The Economist has both in their archives, and only Israel and Turkey stand out from the general stagnation. Now with Erdogan, it appears Turkey might begin to slip backwards as it "turns eastwards" and rids itself of its Kemalist infrastructure.

President Barack Obama is poised to increase the U.S. debt to a level that exceeds the value of the nation’s annual economic output, a step toward what Bill Gross called a “debt super cycle.”

After the economy is devastateed and turned into a combination of Greece and Californication,

“Over the long term, interest rates on government debt will likely have to rise to attract investors,” said Hiroki Shimazu, a market economist in Tokyo at Nikko Cordial Securities Inc., a unit of Japan’s third-largest publicly traded bank. “That will be a big burden on the government and the people.”

The Japanese have been in a slump since their real estate crash in 1990. Now it's our turn, thanks to NUMBER 44 of the 44 POTUSes this country has elected. The final bad news in bold:

The CHART OF THE DAY tracks U.S. gross domestic product and the government’s total debt, which rose past $13 trillion for the first time this month. The amount owed will surpass GDP in 2012, based on forecasts by the International Monetary Fund. The lower panel shows U.S. annual GDP growth as tracked by the IMF, which projects the world’s largest economy to expand at a slower pace than the 3.2 percent average during the past five decades.

Saturday, June 05, 2010

Our friends across the Atlantic are fond of saying that Europeans work to live while Americans live to work. According to the data, they are basically right. Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that while the average Italian, for example, enjoys 42 days of vacation per year, the average American has 16.

A predictable corollary: Many Europeans also expect others to work so they can live. The International Social Survey Programme asked Americans and Europeans whether they believe "It is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes." In virtually all of Western Europe more than 50% agree, and in many countries it is much higher—77% in Spain, whose redistributive economy is in shambles. Meanwhile, only 33% of Americans agree with income redistribution.

After saving their sorry asses after World War II, when the Communist menace threatened and nearly half of the weak-spined degenerates inhabiting the Old World were ready to throw in the towel, the United States forged the great economy that parasitic leeches like Obama, Pelosi, and Dingy Harry with their unionized thuggish brown-shirts want to destroy. Or rather, as the cafe-au-lait man-chile said to Joe the Plumber: "spread the wealth around." How European of him! Not that the Eurotards respect him, because they are sunk in depravity above their eyeballs in trying to get OTHER PEOPLES' MONEY:

Simply put, Europeans have a much stronger taste for other people's money than we do. This is vividly illustrated by the recent protests in the U.S. and Greece. Why are citizens rioting and striking in Greece? Despite the worst economic crisis in decades, labor unions and state functionaries demand that others pay for the early retirements, lifetime benefits and state pensions to which they feel entitled.

In the USA, as the 77-33% divide mentioned above notes, the case is completely different:

In America, however, the tea partiers demonstrate not to get more from others, but rather against government growth, public debt, bailouts and a budget-busting government overhaul of the health-care industry. In other words, the tea partiers are protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding. It is an example of American exceptionalism if there ever was one. Instead of celebrating this ethical populism, however, many political leaders here denounced the legitimacy of the tea party protesters. "It's not really a grass-roots movement," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed after the tax day tea party protests in April 2009. "It's 'astroturf' by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich." Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid borrowed her metaphor to discredit the ObamaCare protests a few months later. Holding up a square of synthetic turf at a press conference last August, Mr. Reid declared that the town hall demonstrations were "about as phony as this grass."

But not as phony as Dingy Harry, Botox Bi-yotch and the Cafe-au-lait Man-Chile. Most Americans disagree.

Average Americans are not as cynical. According to a Rasmussen poll conducted less than a week after the 2009 tax day protests, more than half of Americans viewed the protests favorably. And a September 2009 Kaiser/Harvard/NPR survey found that 61% of those polled believed the ObamaCare protesters at the town hall meetings were mainly individual citizens coming together to express their views. Only 28% bought the idea they were mainly coordinated by health-care interest groups.

But the sad fact is that organized union thugs and crime-spree oriented Demo-rats have gerrymandered the districts to a degree that even taking the House of Representatives back from the Red Queen of Botox will be difficult and with a certifiable porn-queen wannabe up for re-election as Senator for the sick state of mind of Californication, the Senate is also presumably out of reach. What will happen if the sick-o socialists win another round? Brooks spells it out clearly:

While the "astroturf" claims were laughable, the politicians peddling them may yet have the last laugh. For their policies—just as the tea partiers fear—promise to quietly turn today's principled protesters into the "me-first" rioters in Greece.

The increasing size of the federal work force is an early indication of what lies ahead. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in the last year the federal government added 86,000 permanent (non-Census) jobs to the rolls. And high-paying jobs at that: The number of federal salaries over $100,000 per year has increased by nearly 50% since the beginning of the recession.

Today, the average federal worker earns 77% more than the average private-sector worker, according to a USA Today analysis of data from the federal Office of Personnel Management. To pay for bigger government, the private sector will bear a heavier tax burden far into the future, suppressing the innovation and entrepreneurship that creates growth and real opportunity, not to mention the revenue that pays for everything else in the first place.

If these trends are not reversed, it is hard to see how our culture of free enterprise will not change. More and more Americans, especially younger Americans, will grow accustomed to a system in which the government pays better wages, offers the best job protection, allows the earliest retirement, and guarantees the most lavish pensions. Against such competition, more and more young, would-be entrepreneurs will inevitably choose the safety and comfort of government employment—and do so with all the drive that is generally thought to be "good enough" for that kind of work.

What will happen as our increasing number of state employees confront a shrinking private-sector tax base? Just look to the streets of Athens.

"Get me to the Greek" which opens today with P. Diddy or Puff Daddy or Sean Whomever is probably a prophetic symbol of the systemic degeneracy coming down the pike as America succumbs to the fantasy of the "free lunch."" Then the Eurotards will be joined by Ameritards, and the planet's last best hope will be snuffed out, not with a bang, but a whimper.

Friday, June 04, 2010

Politico just doesn't display comments when it claims to have posted one's submission, proving its craven liberal DNA persists even while it, like Mike Allen's "Playbook," plays Lets Pretend that We're all even-handed and fair & balanced just like our journalistic superior, FoxNEWS! Below is my submission to the title Conservatives don't like FTC's journo plan which calls for girding up underperforming [i.e., unreadable libtard trash newspapers and magazines and cable news] with government-subsidized news. Of course, the room temp IQs at Politico wouldn't figure out the real reason for libtard media failures any more than the pitiful PBS Evening News tonight figured out why the stock market went down after the job market tanked. Libtards are supremely stupid, that's why. And arrogant to boot, a devastatingly self-destructive combination, as they will discover in November of this year.

It's very interesting that the liberal news outlets are experiencing a plunge in circulation which will soon mean bankruptcy or closing doors. The NYT, LAT, WaPo, and the tabloid trash Newsweak, Time, etc are all in a tailspin. Meanwhile the Wall Street Journal is actually INCREASING ITS CIRCULATION & several other conservative newspapers are holding steady treading water, but not plummeting like the libtard shill stenographers for the increasingly unpopular [[46% & trending downward] Obama. All the lib cable news can't match FoxNEWS in prime time.

So when you can't win fairly, you cheat. That is the Democrat way, as Mark Rudd told me decades ago as my houseguest in Ann Arbor: "Dare to Cheat, Dare to Win!"

Get the FTC in there to change the finance structures. The Republicans now have a 49-43% advantage over the Demo-rats and that's going to GROW as the Dems frantically hysterically thrash about trying to cheat their way out of their dead-end.

Too much truthyness means ending up on the cutting room floor of the Politico hack/shill/bunko rackets.

La Grande Porte in centuries of yore had a certain dignity even as it posed an existential threat to European Christianity. It was only Columbus's fortuitous discovery of the New World and the invention of the printing press and advanced armaments that enabled Christian Europe to ultimately prevail. But it was almost 250 years after the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 that the tip of the Ottoman spear was permanently blunted by the Poles outside Vienna in 1687. The Treaty of Prestowicz in 1701 began the slow recessional of the barbarous, yet militarily skillful Turks back onto the Anatolian plateau, where like roaches in a bottle or cancer in an organ , they were hemmed in after the First World War surrender by Western custodial military cordon sanitaire.

But after Kemal Ataturk decided that the mind is a terrible thing to waste and forced westernization took hold after twenty years of military domination with Ataturk's stern custodial glare overseeing the process, the Turks were left in a limbo of uncertainty. The Cold War put them as the eastern right flank opposing their traditional Russian enemy, so for another forty years, the Turks felt at least useful as they worked hard to industrialize and modernize their ancient customs and backward religious practices. No more veils for women or honor killings, but in my dozen or so trips to Turkey during the nineties, I was always shown the police stations or "torture chambers" by my Turkish guides where suspects were treated with medieval "human rights."

Robert Pollock has an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal entitledErdogan and the Decline of the Turks which is a narrative of one country's descent into a psychotic break with reality, or at least the past one hundred years of its history since the "Young Turks" broke the power of the Ottoman caliphate in 1908:

To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don't speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn't really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States.

For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about "Who lost Turkey?" when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. "organ market."

Remember that the dimwit Prime Minister is a devout Muslim which already predisposes him to outlandish misconceptions about, well, about just anything rational that the West can convey to a bunch of warrior nomads just half a millenium off the steppes.

The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America.

The Mosul and organ harvesting stories were soon brought together in a hit Turkish movie called "Valley of the Wolves," which I saw in 2006 at a mall in Ankara. My poor Turkish was little barrier to understanding. The body parts of dead Iraqis could be clearly seen being placed into crates marked New York and Tel Aviv. It is no exaggeration to say that such anti-Semitic fare had not been played to mass audiences in Europe since the Third Reich.

Hitler is probably a couple of notches above the Turkish PM on the scale of civilized notions of interstate relations. Pollockin an interview asked the devout Muslim about the film:When I interviewed Prime Minister Erdogan (one of several encounters) in 2006, he was unabashed about the narrative.

Erdogan: "I believe the people who made this movie took media reports as their basis . . . for example, Abu Ghraib prison—we have seen this on TV, and now we are watching Guantanamo Bay in the world media, and of course it could be that this movie was prepared under these influences."

Global View Columnist Bret Stephens explains why Israel's best friend in the Middle East is now an adversary.

Me: "But do you believe that many Turks have such a view of America, that we're the kind of people who'd go to Iraq and kill people to take their organs?"

Erdogan: "These kind of things happen in the world. If it's not happening in Iraq, then its happening in other countries."

Me: "Which kind of things? Killing people to take their organs?"

Erdogan: "I'm not saying they are being killed. . . . There are people in poverty who use this as a means to get money."

Actually, there is a method to Erdogan's "madness" and that is to wean his Turkish myrmidons away from the West and toward an Islamic Republic which Ahmadinejad is the secular leader, because Erdogan would wear both an Ayatollah's and a president's hat were Turkey to lurch eastward:

I was somewhat taken aback that the prime minister could not bring himself to condemn a fictional blood libel. I should not have been. He and his party have traded on America and Israel hatred ever since. There can be little doubt the Turkish flotilla that challenged the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza was organized with his approval, if not encouragement. Mr. Erodogan's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, is a proponent of a philosophy which calls on Turkey to loosen Western ties to the U.S., NATO and the European Union and seek its own sphere of influence to the east. Turkey's recent deal to help Iran enrich uranium should come as no surprise.

Sadly, Turkey has had no credible opposition since its corrupt secular parties lost to Mr. Erdogan in 2002. The Ataturk-inspired People's Republican Party has just thrown off one leader who was constantly railing about CIA plots for another who wants to expand state spending as government coffers collapse everywhere else in the word. What's more, Turks remain blind to their manifest hypocrisies. Ask how they would feel if other countries arranged an "aid" convoy (akin to the Gaza flotilla) for their own Kurdish minority and you'll be met with dumb stares.

Turkey's blind spot on the Kurdish issue is especially striking when you recall that Turkey nearly invaded Syria in 1998 for sponsoring Kurdish terrorism. Kurdish separatist leader Abdullah Ocalan then bounced around the capitals of Europe, only to be captured in Kenya and handed over to the Turks by the CIA. Turkey's antiterror alliance with Israel and the U.S. couldn't have been more natural.

Yet Prime Minister Erdogan was one of the first world leaders to recognize the legitimacy of the Hamas government in Gaza. And now he is upping the rhetoric after provoking Israel on Hamas's behalf. It is Israel, he says, that has shocked "the conscience of humanity." Foreign Minister Davutoglu is challenging the U.S: "We expect full solidarity with us. It should not seem like a choice between Turkey and Israel. It should be a choice between right and wrong."

In my visits to Turkey and frequent conversations in Washington and New York, it is chilling when the subjects of the Kurds or the Armenian genocide come up. The moral obtuseness of the Turk is apparently all of a piece, and its many atrocities in the Balkans of the nineteenth century on subject populations bear witness that these creatures are wolves in human form. There is no pity, compassion, or intelligence outside of a cynical "everybody does it" attitude that most Turkish journalists, even the very few sophisticated ones, wear on their sleeve for all to see.

This is religious nationalism which is simply fanaticism at a sort of low-key intensity. The Arabs jump up and down and shout and hold their breath and behave like moronic children who have to repeat a grade because their ADHD is a complete condition. The Turks have a quiet malice and lack of any human values when they are crossed. Simply Mongols in an urban setting. Pollock ends his piece appropriately. The Turks will never understand because a conscience is outside their cultural and religious frames of reference, but Pollock is right:

The obvious answer to the question of "Who lost Turkey?"—the Western-oriented Turkey, that is—is the Turks did. The outstanding question is how much damage they'll do to regional peace going forward.

As for primitive mindsets like those of the Turks and Arabs, any attempt at reconciliation will be regarded as weakness. Sadly, we have a coward and a nitwit in the Oval Office. So damage will continue until a grown-up occupies 1600 PA Avenue.

Thursday, June 03, 2010

Long Ago, I travelled often to Canada and late at night after a few beers, reporters [I was one at the time] from the Great White North would tell me that the Canadians were obsessed with losing the way Americans are obsessed with winning.

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default. The Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer league’s newly implemented edict is intended to dissuade a runaway game in favour of sportsmanship. The rule replaces its five-point mercy regulation, whereby any points scored beyond a five-point differential would not be registered.

Remember when something fabulous happened, the response used to be "only in America!"

Whenever anything pitiful and pathetic beyond forgiveness occurs in public life nowadays in North America, the instinct is to say "only in Canada!"

And can you imagine a loser-obsessed Canucktard behind by five points kicking the ball into his own goal to win the game by default. The cowardly craven groveling yellowbelly Canadian national ethos makes this very easy to imagine!!!

Where losing is admired more than winning, no wonder the Canucktards haven't had a Stanley Cup since the last Millennium. The ethos of losing paralyzes their teams---and nearby Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo seem to be catching the Canucktard disease by osmosis!!!

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

The P.O.S. POTUS staining the Oval Office has another bribe-attempt in Colorado following the Sestak schmooze-up by serial perjurer B.J. Clinton. Mark Halperin stained his own underwear by a wet-fart tongue-job of Obama's rear=nether orifice---the reason that E.J. Dionne speaks with a lisp derives from its surgical separation from Obama's BIG ASS. Marky the Game Change wunderscheisskopf-kid tries desperately to whip up more hysteria about how bad a Republican come-back would be while telling folks not to watch the serial train-wreck catastrophes now inflicted on the USA by the Demo-rat hordes of rodents carrying political bubonic plague in their flea-infested coats.

And the American public senses that Obama is a rat in a smooth-talkin' con-chile clown suit. The suck-up stenographers like Halperin evidently still have room in their lower backsides to take a couple more inches of black priapic pushing, but aside from the Jew-boy JournoList.serve Comintern crew, the rest of the media is getting restive, even sluggish Tom Friedman is starting to move his immense bowels over the direction Obama is going.

Gallup's huge jump in the polling for Republicans as the generic choice of voters has hit 50% while the lame-o Demo-rats are sinking fast and are now down to 43%.

Once ObamaCare is seen as the Pyhrric victory of rampant homos like Barney and Chris Dodd and Nancy Botox & Dingy Harry, the American people can reject this suppurating sore on America's ass in 2012 and get back to some sense of direction besides the sewer that Obama is aiming us all at.

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"''I have drunk ale from the Country of the Young And weep because I know all things now: I have been a hazel-tree, and they hung The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough
Among my leaves in times out of mind....' Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments...the fortune of us that are the moon's men doth ebb and flow like the sea, being govern'd, as the sea is, by the moon."
Twenty-and-eight the phases of the moon, The full and the moon’s dark and all the crescents, Twenty-and-eight, and yet but six-and-twenty The cradles that a man must needs be rocked in: For there’s no human life at the full or the dark. From the first crescent to the half, the dream But summons to adventure and the man Is always happy like a bird or a beast; But while the moon is rounding towards the full He follows whatever whim’s most difficult...An aged man is but a paltry thing,A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress....Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.